You Can See It Coming

So, working forward from the previous post, and noting this excellent essay (h/t WRSA), try a little mental experiment:

You're in Rome as the Visigoths march in.
Or you wake up on the RMS Titanic the day after it's sailed from England.
Or it's today, except in 1939, and you're in France.

For the purposes of this game, you aren't allowed to leave. You cannot, for example, steal a lifeboat early and set yourself adrift the evening before Titanic goes down. Nor leave France, nor build a boat and sail to North America at the dawn of the Middle Ages. Those options are right out.

You're stuck, where you are.

Nothing you do will fundamentally alter history. You can't warn the captain, you can't print anti-Hitler handbills, and you won't be able to stem the tide of barbarians by inventing gunpowder, designing cannon, and crafting Gatling guns. What happened before is going to happen, this time, with you in it up to your neck.

So.
What do you do?

You have what everyone always wishes for on every Top Ten List of Superpowers.
You know the future. In these cases, anyways, and only in the broad strokes.

So, with that knowledge, what do you do to make sure that you don't get washed up in the hereafter, a casualty of bad choice amidst time and space, unlike hordes of people were in these historical examples?

Now apply that to right here, right now.
Everything in the world you think you know is going to crash and burn, for whatever reason.
SMOD, despotism, disaster, a plague of cannibalistic zombies, whatever turns your crank.

Because it is. Not might, IS.

Don't take my word for it. Check the news. Read 3,000,000,000 people on the internet. Check your gut, your spidey sense, your little voice inside.
Unless you've been stoned off your ass for decades, it's probably been screaming for months, if not years. "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!!"

Of course, everyone else could be wrong. You could be insane. (I certainly could be.)

But you know and I know and half the planet knows, you're not.
The one constant of  human history is everything wonderful going tits up at some point, usually gloriously aflame. Panic, chaos, disorder. War, Famine, Plague, and Death, the same four cavalrymen who've attended pretty much every step of the human race since forever, and nearly always will.

So, you know it. It's coming.


What are you doing about that?
Not tomorrow, not next year when things are easier, but RFN.

If your "Did" list isn't one helluva lot larger than your "To Do" list, you're waaaaay behind the curve on things.

And anything you prepare for (unless you're expecting the world will be overrun by a ravaging horde of rainbow-farting unicorns peeing rivers of gold and crapping strawberries and marshmallows) is something you can leverage into whatever does come, whether it's a greater or lesser magnitude come that day.

We're all gonna die, someday, but shocked, surprised, scared, cold, naked, hungry, bloody, and herded into oblivion because of rampant unpreparedness is a really shitty way to check out, as opposed to fat, old, and happy and dying of natural causes in your bed, with your descendants around the room to see you off.

Your time. Your choice.